Zyuganov

His Communist Party Embraces The Disinherited, Gloomy Over A Russia They No Longer Recognize.

June 16, 1996|By Ray Moseley, Tribune Staff Writer.

MOSCOW — Gennady Andreyevich Zyuganov, 51, a former math teacher turned politician, is the embodiment of Russian nostalgia for the fallen Soviet empire, an admirer of the late dictator Josef Stalin and an outspoken critic of the United States.

But as Boris Yeltsin's principal challenger in Sunday's presidential election, he has tried to present himself in the West as a new-style Communist leader: a social democrat who would not renationalize industries and would restore Russian greatness without resorting to a new Stalinist reign of terror.

He has promised that, if elected president, he will follow "a balanced and sensible course." But his opponents charge that his election would turn the clock back on free-market reforms, re-ignite confrontation with the West and bring free elections to an end.

Portly, balding, colorless and a wooden speaker, Zyuganov presents a sharp contrast with Yeltsin. Instead of flamboyance and personal excess, he offers ideological commitment, a rejection of modernist reforms and a willingness to work with nationalists of the extreme Right.

His basic appeal is to the roughly one-third of the electorate who cannot yet accept the loss of Soviet power, the disappearance of the old system's cradle-to-grave security, the growing gap between rich and poor.

His Communist Party is the party of the rural poor, the generation of war veterans and other retired people and those angry over arrears in pay and pensions. It is the party of the disinherited, gloomy over the future of a Russia they no longer recognize.

Perhaps most alarming to the West and to Russia's nearest neighbors, Zyuganov has promised to restore the Soviet Union--but, he says, without resort to tanks. He maintains that the people of the former Soviet republics--especially the 25 million ethnic Russians living in these lands--yearn to return to the fold.

He accuses the U.S. of treating Russia as a "junior partner" in world affairs, and claims the Soviet Union was destroyed by a conspiracy hatched in Washington involving such sinister forces as the Trilateral Commission, the American Council on Foreign Relations and various international lending institutions--all bent on "a united world government" under U.S. aegis.

As for Stalin, Zyuganov dismisses the idea that tens of millions of Soviet citizens were put to death under his regime. The true figure, he says, was only about 500,000, and he calls Stalin a true patriot who rallied the nation to victory in World War II.

Like Stalin, he embraces the anti-Semitism of traditional Russian nationalism, asserting that Jews control the levers of the Western economic system and exert a malign influence over the West's culture and world outlook. But these views have been confined to his writings, not to his campaign oratory.

He promises respect for political dissent even as he denigrates the Western campaign for human rights in the old Soviet Union. There were only 300 or so dissidents in the Soviet Union, he says, "and there was endless noise about them everywhere."

He says he abandoned the old Communist dogmas of class struggle and atheism, joining nationalists in invoking the place of the Orthodox Church in Russian society.

He promises to carry out a program of "genuine reform," primarily meaning tax reform, and likens himself in this respect to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He also says he is committed to a strong private sector, and will offer incentives and guarantees to Western investors.

Zyuganov has come to his present eminence from a career as a Communist Party ideologist. He has never held a government post, but vaulted to the leadership of his party through organizational skills that have made the Communists the country's dominant left-wing group, with 560,000 members.

Born June 26, 1944, in the village of Mymriyno, in a farming area 250 miles south of Moscow, he became active in party work at an early age, while pursuing a teaching career like his parents.

By the early 1980s he had become head of a section of the Communist Party propaganda department in Moscow. Later he was deputy to the chief of the Central Committee's ideology department, and increasingly a critic of the reforms begun by then-President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Three weeks before the attempted coup against Gorbachev in 1991, Zyuganov penned a newspaper article warning that the Soviet Union was "perishing, breaking up and being plunged into darkness and nonexistence." But he did not join other Gorbachev critics in the coup. After it collapsed and Yeltsin, the new government leader, banned the Communist Party, Zyuganov took advantage of a court ruling that allowed the party to continue to operate at the local and regional level. He became the head of a new Russian Communist Party.

He also took a leading role in the National Salvation Front, an alliance of anti-Yeltsin forces that ranged from the Communist Left to far-Right nationalism. Some leaders of the Front took part in the violent clash between Parliament and Yeltsin in October 1993, but he stayed apart from the rebellion. Afterward he won a seat in Parliament and in 1995 led his party to first place in parliamentary elections with 22 percent of the vote.

Zyuganov has published five books in the last three years, outlining his vision of a Russia restored to its powerful place in the world and projecting a sanitized view of the sins of the Communist past. It is all permeated with an angry and sometimes menacing rejection of the West and its liberal values.

"You are instilling in us an anti-Americanism," he wrote. "Even during the Cold War there was not the anti-Americanism there is now."